


Form and Matter

by Philosopher_King



Series: Form and Matter [2]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Canon Compliant, Cunnilingus, Dysfunctional Family, Established Relationship, Family Issues, Female Loki (Marvel), M/M, Other, Post-Thor: Ragnarok (2017), References To Canon Suicide Attempt, Shapeshifter Loki (Marvel), Sibling Incest, Vaginal Fingering, at least not yet, but not genderfluid, more or less
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-15
Updated: 2018-02-15
Packaged: 2019-03-18 23:01:21
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,124
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13691652
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Philosopher_King/pseuds/Philosopher_King
Summary: "It had been a fortnight since Thor had asked Loki whether it was possible to shapeshift into a female Ás for the purpose of producing an heir. Thor wasn't at all sure that Loki had been trying, or even wanted to, and he was reluctant to bring it up again so soon. He had not given up, however; now that he had permitted himself the hope that he might truly wed Loki and rule beside him as king and consort, he would not let go of that hope so quickly..."Loki was waiting for him, sitting on the edge of their bed. As Thor approached, however, he noticed that Loki's posture was strangely tense, and there was something different about his face. He paused, frowning, and Loki stood, looking anxious. 'Well, I've done it,' he said, and his voice was higher than its usual register, though with the same smoothness and musical cadence."





	Form and Matter

**Author's Note:**

  * For [puckity](https://archiveofourown.org/users/puckity/gifts).



> For the Thorki Secret Valentine exchange on Tumblr, puckity requested "Any firsts between Thor and Loki, at any time in their lives" and also expressed an interest in "intersex!Loki." I took some liberties with the latter in order to follow up on an idea I'd toyed with before in the (very) short fic "Possibilities," to which this is listed as a sequel. The second chapter, which I didn't manage to write before the Valentine's Day deadline but do still intend to add (as a St. Patrick's Day present...?), will involve more firsts as well as bringing in another of the recipient's kink requests ;-)

It had been a fortnight since Thor had asked Loki whether it was possible to shapeshift into a female Ás for the purpose of producing an heir.  Thor wasn’t at all sure that Loki had been trying, or even wanted to, and he was reluctant to bring it up again so soon.  He had not given up, however; now that he had permitted himself the hope that he might truly wed Loki and rule beside him as king and consort, he would not let go of that hope so quickly.

He had not seen Loki since dinner (or what passed for it; they had been eating a great deal of thin soup and grain mash, and it would be a week before they could stop on an inhabited world to trade for something else).  He had not really expected to; he had been consulting with Heimdall about the morale of his exiled people, and he knew that Loki and the Watchman did not like or trust one another, and did not wish to spend any more time in each other’s company than necessary.  (This Thor hoped to remedy before he took Loki as his consort, but it would be a gradual process.)  After wandering the ship, speaking with the men and women who had emerged as leaders of the various communities of interest (former farmers, former artisans, the caretakers of children, the Sakaaran rebels…), Thor headed toward the stateroom he shared with Loki, intending to have a small nightcap (their liquor supply, prodigious as it had been, still needed to last until they reached Earth) and then go to bed.

Loki was waiting for him when he entered, sitting on the edge of their bed, wearing a blue satin-like robe he had stashed in a pocket dimension sometime before the destruction of Asgard (a gift from the Grandmaster, no doubt, but Thor preferred not to dwell on that too much).  The meaning of the robe was fairly clear: Loki wanted his clothing to be easy to remove.  Weary as he was, Thor smiled; too often, these days, they were both too tired or preoccupied or discouraged to want to make love, and not infrequently, he returned from some meeting or other to find his brother already asleep.

As Thor approached, however, he noticed that Loki’s posture was strangely tense, and there was something different about his face.  He paused, frowning, and Loki stood, looking anxious.

“Well, I’ve done it,” he said, and his voice was higher than its usual register, though with the same smoothness and musical cadence.

“You’ve— you’re a woman,” Thor said, then wanted to smack himself for sounding so stupid.

“No,” Loki said sharply, and how strange it sounded in that steely contralto rather than his usual velvet baritone.  “No, I have taken on a female anatomy, which is neither necessary nor sufficient for being a woman.  I am as much a man as I ever was… or as little,” he added; it may have been intended as self-deprecating humor, but came out as bitterness.

“May I… may I see you?”

Loki laughed, and that too sounded strange and light.  He wrapped his arms around himself protectively, which only ended up accentuating the new curves that swelled under the robe.  “I cannot count the number of times you have seen my body, both before we became lovers and since… and yet this feels like a first time.  Or like I am exposing someone else’s body without consent.”

“It is your own, to share as you will,” Thor assured him, though surely he did not to be told.  “And as for first times—it is a gift, is it not?  After so many years, to see and be seen as if for the first time?”

Loki shrugged with another little laugh, and it sounded so much like Frigga’s that a lump rose into Thor’s throat.  “I have no romantic notions about that kind of first.  The first time we made love was far from the first time we’d seen each other naked; and for the rest… I’ve had no other _lovers._ Just people I had to fuck, for one reason or another.”

Thor grimaced; he didn’t like thinking about that any more than he liked thinking about the source of parts of Loki’s wardrobe.  During the year after his fall, he said, _“I proved not to be above using sex to buy influence, advantage, knowledge… so of course I would not hesitate to trade it for my survival and safety.  Or yours.”_

“Then let this be your first _first._ Your first first time revealing yourself to a lover who wants nothing more than to worship you.”

Thor stepped closer, close enough to see that whereas Loki was usually only an inch shorter than he was, now he stood half a head shorter.  Thor supposed this must be the body Loki would have grown into, had he been born female; he was still very tall for his borrowed sex, but not as dramatically so as if he had maintained his usual height.

“Too bad I won’t be getting anything new,” Loki teased him with a familiar mouth-quirk; his lips were as pale and slender as ever.

“Maybe you won’t be _seeing_ anything new,” Thor corrected, “but I certainly intend to make sure you _get_ a few things that are new.”

Loki gave a mock-offended gasp.  “Did I ever say that anyone was _getting_ anything tonight?”

“I apologize for my presumption,” Thor said gallantly; “I admit that I took your garb as an… invitation, but I know that such things can never be assumed.”

“Your apology is accepted,” Loki said with affected haughtiness.  “And you are welcome to persuade me that there should be some getting as well as seeing.”

“I welcome the challenge,” Thor said with a wolfish smile.

With hands that trembled slightly Loki untied the robe, opened it, and let it fall around his feet.

He was much as he ever had been: still slender, with narrow hips that flared out just a little more from his waist than they had before.  His breasts— _his,_ not hers, Thor reminded himself, regardless of how he had been conditioned to read the body before him—were wide-set and firm, the small rosy nipples angling just slightly outward.  The thatch of dark hair between his legs was unchanged, but now nothing could be seen emerging from beneath it.  Thor resolutely kept his gaze away from that region, however it drew his curiosity.

“They’re not very big, I’m afraid,” Loki remarked with a frown, lightly framing his new breasts with his fingers.

“They’re beautiful,” Thor assured him.  _“You’re_ beautiful.”

“No, you never were one to go for the buxom wenches, were you?” Loki mused; Thor was wary of the slight edge in his voice.  “And your preference in paramours—Sif, and that mortal woman, Jane…”

“Can you not simply accept a compliment without turning it around to impugn my motives?” Thor interrupted, trying to make his irritation sound good-humored.

“I suspect not,” Loki answered, with entirely too much sincerity.  “Now, I’d appreciate it if you would join me in my undress… this is starting to feel a bit _Déjeuner sur l’herbe_.”

“It feels lunch on the grass…?”

“Oh, I thought you’d have started getting my Midgardian references now.  It’s a French painting, nineteenth-century…”

“Oh!  You mean the one with the naked women and the fully dressed men having a picnic?  Yes, I’ve seen that one.  The Lady Darcy explained that it’s a commentary on the casual male consumption of the female body in art and commerce… oh.”  Thor immediately started unlacing his tunic, so quickly that his fingers stumbled.

Loki gave another laugh, genuinely amused this time, which made it sound even more like Frigga’s.  “One of many reasons having a female body does not make me a woman: I have not grown up with the expectation of being casually consumed.”

“I think you underestimate how much casual consumption the ladies of Asgard are capable of.”

“You don’t think that consideration went into the casting decisions for my play…?”

“I’m trying to flatter you and you keep sidestepping me,” Thor complained.  By now he was also fully nude, standing with his arms folded in half-feigned annoyance.

“And I do appreciate the effort,” Loki said, still sounding amused.  He gave Thor an approving once-over that added a layer of ambiguity to his words, then stepped closer and pried Thor’s right hand away from where it was tucked under his arm.  “But you’re going to have to learn to dance faster,” he whispered, pulling Thor in as if offering to teach him.

Thor couldn’t resist the opportunity to lay a light kiss on Loki’s teasingly quirked lips.  “Fast enough to keep up with you?  Impossible.”

“See, you’re making progress already!  You lack practice, that’s all.”

Thor frowned.  “You think I don’t have practice flattering w— lovers?”

Loki’s eyes narrowed briefly; Thor wondered if he had caught the near slip, but he said nothing about it.  “I think you don’t have practice flattering _me_.”

Thor winced a little; Loki had recently called to his attention the ways in which Thor had taken him for granted throughout their youth, and after a good deal of honest retrospection, Thor had realized that he had a point.  “I shall take advantage of every opportunity for practice from now on,” he promised, and it was only in jest that it was a jest.

“Good,” Loki said against his lips.

Thor pulled them down onto the bed, Loki lying atop him as they continued to kiss.  His lips were no softer than they had been (and Thor was honestly not sure why he had expected them to be), but the skin of his face was certainly smoother, lacking any traces of the coarse hair that Loki so assiduously cut away every morning.  His body was lighter, too; Thor had been able to move him easily enough in his usual form, but oh, the possibilities with this one…

Loki had obviously noticed the same things, because as Thor effortlessly rolled them so that Loki was lying on his back with Thor crouched above, looking down at him, he gave a surprised and delighted “Oh!”, then remarked, “Argh, your beard is like sandpaper… it’s never chafed that much before.  It’s as if my entire face is new skin… well, it is, I suppose, but I mean the kind that forms as a burn heals.”

“Oh, sorry.”  Jane had occasionally complained about it, but Thor supposed it was different because she was used to her own soft, hairless skin.  He moved down to lay his kisses instead along Loki’s shoulder; it sloped more gently than it had before, but the same powerful muscles lay beneath the ivory skin, filling out the long, graceful arms, covered with a scattering of now slightly finer dark hair.  “Is this better?” he asked, pausing amid the line of kisses he was leaving on the soft underside of Loki’s arm.

“Well, yes… that’s no different than before.”  Loki’s pretense at being unaffected was thin; his voice was breathy and trembled slightly.

“And this?”  Thor’s lips traced a line back inward from Loki’s upper arm to the new swell of flesh that fell beside it, and Loki drew in a sharp breath; he took the plumper, redder nipple into his mouth and Loki let the breath out in a whimper.

“That is… somewhat different,” Loki acknowledged, then coughed to cover the way his voice had grown high and slightly strangled.

Thor chuckled, then drew back to look down at his brother’s body.  In spite of the new curves and softened lines, it was overwhelmingly familiar: the tangle of dark hair like spilled ink on the pillow; the dilated pupils darkening ice-green eyes to liquid emerald; the blush highlighting those implausible cheekbones and spreading high on the pale chest, just above the jagged new scar that began below the breastbone…

Thor quickly looked away from that and back to the much more welcome new additions to either side.  A thought occurred to him, and he remarked, “It is strange that I should see you in this form before I have seen you in your true form.”

“My _‘true’_ form?”  Loki’s mouth tightened into a hard line.  “You mean my Jötunn form.”

“Well, yes…” Thor said, but trailed off as the look on Loki’s face grew stormier, and something like anger glinted in his eyes.

“What makes it any ‘truer’ than my Aesir form—the body you have known me in for all our lives?”  Loki’s voice was calm and even, but he seemed to be making an effort to keep it so.

“It is the body you were born with,” Thor said carefully.

“Should that matter?” Loki asked.  His tone had taken on the kind of slow, deliberate patience it had when he was about to demonstrate what he called _the Socratic method,_ which usually seemed to involve slowly, deliberately, and patiently dismembering Thor with words and logic.

Thor sighed and resigned himself to dismemberment.  “Should it not?”

“What if you, born a prince, had been raised by goatherds and lived among them for as long as you could remember; expected to be a goatherd your whole life, just like everyone around you; learned everything about how to raise goats and nothing about how to lead a realm or an army… what would make you any more _truly_ a prince than a goatherd?”

Thor considered, then asked, “I would still be the rightful heir to the throne, would I not?”

Loki raised his eyebrows.  “‘Rightful’ only matters if you are recognized as such.  Hela was the rightful heir to the throne of Asgard, but what good did that do her in the end, when the people rose up to support the second-born pretender?”

Thor sat back on his heels, surprised and not a little offended.  “‘ _Pretender’?_ That seems unfair…”

“Only because your claim was honored and hers was not,” Loki countered.  “You have seen what ‘rightful’ claims are worth.  What Jötunn would accept me as one of their own, knowing where and how I was raised?”  He cast his eyes to one side, his brow furrowed, and he added quietly, “And what I have done?”

They had never spoken of Loki’s attempt to destroy the world of his birth, but those quiet words gave him a glimpse into a barely tapped well of guilt, horror, and grief.  “Oh, Loki…” Thor said, and the hand he put to his brother’s cheek seemed like such meager comfort.  “You will always have a home here, among us,” he vowed.  “And I will gladly call your Aesir form your true one if you feel it to be so.”

“But does it matter what _I_ feel?” Loki pressed, to Thor’s puzzled frown.  “You are surely not the only one who thinks of the shape I was born in as my _true_ form, who thinks that birth is what determines one’s true identity.  If the goatherd born a prince were denied his birthright, all unprepared to rule as he is, would his goatherd family still accept him as their own?”  Evidently it was a rhetorical question, because he did not wait for an answer, but immediately concluded: “He would be cast out of both worlds, neither one thing nor the other.”

Thor shook his head almost frantically and grasped Loki’s hand, which had been picking anxiously at creases and stray threads in the sheets.  “But that is not you, Loki; you are both, you should be permitted to be both, openly and without shame.  Your birth is part of you, as your upbringing is, and I would know all of you: male and female, Aesir and Jötunn.”  He paused, still stroking his thumb over Loki’s knuckles in an effort to be soothing.  Something still nagged at him about the play Loki had “commissioned” while posing as Odin (but had obviously written; even aside from the details no one else could have known, Thor was certain Loki would trust no one else to dramatize his life).  Finally he ventured, “Indeed, you revealed to all of Asgard your origin, did you not?”

“Yes,” Loki acknowledged, meeting Thor’s eye almost defiantly.  “Hoping I might find acceptance in death, if not in life.”

That reply took Thor aback.  “Surely you did not think to wear Father’s face forever.”

“No, but if the masquerade ended with my death—at your hands or another’s—it would hardly matter.”

As ever, Loki was unmatched in his ability to toss off the most morbid predictions and the bitterest of accusations, or both at once, with an insouciant air.  “You really thought I would…?”

“You did threaten to,” Loki pointed out. “More than once.”

Thor gave him a pained smile.  “I threaten a lot of things.”

“Yes, and one never knows when you’ll go through with them.  At any rate, I’ve been living on borrowed time for the last four years… six years, really.”  Loki’s mouth twisted into a smile that might better be called a grimace, or a sneer.  “The last thousand years, if you ask Odin.”

Thor flinched, just slightly, recalling Loki’s rebuke on a mountaintop in Midgard.  “You still will not call him ‘Father’?  Even after he acknowledged you his son?”

Loki fixed him with a cold stare.  “A moment of sentimentality on the edge of death does not atone for all his sins.”

“His ‘ _sins_ ’?”

Loki abruptly sat upright, shaking off all of Thor’s efforts at soothing touch.  “‘Your birthright was to die,’ that’s what he told me.  And ‘Frigga is the only reason you’re still alive, and you’ll never see her again.’”  He stood up and paced away from the bed, then turned again to face Thor.  His arms were wrapped around himself across his chest, white-knuckled hands gripping his upper arms, and Thor was not sure what the gesture signified: an effort to cover his breasts, or to warm himself, or to shield himself somehow, or perhaps rather to keep something in.

Thor shook his head; there was a strange ringing in his ears, and he did not quite trust what he had heard. “You don’t believe he really would have sentenced you to death—his own son…”

“He’d already done it once,” Loki spat, hugging himself tighter; “why not a second time?”

“What do you mean, he’d already done it…?”  Thor wondered for a moment whether Loki meant Thor’s banishment to Earth as a mortal, the possibility that he might be killed or even die of old age before he proved himself worthy…  But then he met Loki’s eyes, saw the haunted, hollow look in them—a mere reflection of the abyss he had seen in those eyes once before, emptied of life and light by two words: _“No, Loki.”_   “That was never what he intended, you know it was not.”

Loki’s laugh was sharp and brittle.  “Really, what could he have expected under the circumstances?”

“Not what happened.  He could not have known…”

“Because he never knew _me_ ,” Loki cut in.  “Not really.”

The words hung in the air, so sharp they seemed to tear it, leaving a rift like one of Loki’s secret pathways between worlds.  An open wound through which a whole lifetime of pain and resentment might bleed, or suppurate, if they were not quick to bind it up.

“So that’s why you felt justified in sentencing _him_ to death,” Thor said quietly.  It was his resentment, too, not only Loki’s, bleeding into the air between them.

But Loki blinked, looking surprised.  “I—what?  I sentenced him to a Midgardian elder-care home, which is hardly the same thing.”  His voice turned bitter again when he added, “Considering that he didn’t remember who he was, I imagine that it was considerably more pleasant than my time in prison.”

“But you took his powers, did you not?  Left him mortal, and let old age overtake him all at once?”

Loki shook his head.  “I didn’t even know how to strip him of his powers the way he did when he banished you; all I could do was make him forget how to use them.  How else could he have broken free of the spell?”

“So you did nothing to speed his death.”

“Not that I know of.  He might very well have died at the same time in any case.”

“But for his grief, which likely hastened his end.”

Loki narrowed his eyes, seeming to search Thor’s face, then shook his head again.  “His grief for Mother would have done that regardless of what I did.  Indeed, I may have put off his death by making him forget it for a few years.”  Thor thought that puff of air through his nose might have been intended as a laugh.

“I meant his grief for what _you_ had done,” Thor said, and he surprised himself with how little like an accusation it sounded.  “That he had lost you, for good and all.”

Loki took in a breath, seemingly ready to turn defensive, but then he paused and let the breath out again, thoughtful.  “He had more than two years already to grieve over losing me,” he said at last.

Upon reflection, he was right.  Thor had lost and regained Loki three, perhaps four times over the past six years (depending on how one counted his planned betrayal on Sakaar); Odin, it seemed, had lost him once and forever.

Loki fitfully rubbed at his arms as if he felt cold and flashed a nervous-looking smile.  “This isn’t doing much for the mood, is it?”

Thor stood up from the bed, went to Loki, gently took his hands and kissed the curled fingers.  “We don’t have to do anything,” he said.  “There will be time later.”

Loki’s answering smile was small and crooked, but at last genuinely warm.  “You could kiss me.  That would be all right.”

So Thor did, cradling Loki’s face with one hand, the fingers bracing his neck at the base of his skull and the thumb stroking over his ear; Thor relished the sigh that Loki breathed into his mouth at that touch, infinitely familiar but somehow never old.

They were still kissing when Loki started walking them back toward the bed.  “You said you could make me feel something new,” he breathed between kisses, then pushed Thor’s knees against the side of the bed until he was forced to sit and climbed over him.  “I want that.  Very much.”

They both grinned when Thor swept Loki up with one arm and deposited him onto his back in one smooth, easy motion.  “Good,” said Thor, still grinning.  He thoroughly licked the fingers of one hand and then slid it through the dark curls between his legs, searching, until—

Loki gasped and brought his legs together, trapping Thor’s hand between his thighs.  “Fuck, that’s—”  He took a couple of deep breaths, collecting himself, then said, “I did know that was effectively an entire prick condensed into a much smaller area, but I didn’t know what that _felt_ like.”

“You’re making me wish I shared your shapeshifting talent,” Thor remarked.

“I’m not sure if I can transfer it, but we have a few thousand years to experiment…”

“You’ll have to release my hand if you want me to keep going,” Thor pointed out, flapping his wrist helplessly to make the point.

“Yes, all right,” Loki said.  He let out another deep breath and eased his legs apart.  “Gently, though.”

“Of course.”  Thor slid his fingers down into the cleft below, just touching, letting his fingers play among the folds of velvet skin, not yet seeking entry until he knew Loki’s body was ready to receive him.  Loki was breathing hard, letting out the occasional overwhelmed “mmph.”  When Thor’s fingers crept back up to rub gently at his clit, his legs tensed, threatening to clap shut again, until Thor laid his other hand lightly on Loki’s hip.

Loki’s body was starting to produce its own lubrication, which emboldened Thor to slide his middle finger into his slit.  The muscles in its walls tightened with Loki’s sharp inhale, but did not push him out.  He waited for Loki to relax, then slid the finger deeper, withdrew it, slipped it in again…  With his thumb he gathered some of the slick leaking from Loki’s cunt and moved it in soft, slow circles around his clit.  Loki groaned and squeezed his eyes shut, and his hips bucked upward reflexively.  Thor slid his index finger in beside his third and crooked them upward, feeling for telltale ridges in the wall above them; a moan from Loki, head tilted back to temptingly bare his throat, and another jerk of his hips told him he had done something right.

A sudden thought made him pause the movements of his hand; Loki felt him stop, opened his eyes, and demanded, “What?”

“What if I get you with child in this body and you try to change back into your usual form?  Would it stop you somehow?”

Loki stared back at him with the concentrated disdain that none but he could distill into a single gaze.  “Really, Thor,” he said, and again it was not until he heard it in this new alto voice that Thor realized how very much like Frigga he sounded, in his scolding as well as his laughter.  “Let me list all the reasons that’s a ridiculous question.  First, what makes you think I would let your cock into this body the very first time I share it with you?  That’s quite a lot to demand of a new vagina, don’t you think?  Yes, go on, smirk; take the flattery and run with it, because I’m not done telling you why you’re an idiot.  Second: even if I did let you fuck me, what in _Yggdrasil_ makes you think I would let your seed take root the first time?”

“You can prevent that with your magic?” Thor asked, intrigued.

“No, _I_ can’t—I never learned, for obvious reasons—but I _can_ go to the healers under a glamour and ask them for the charm… which I have, because _one_ of us needs to be thinking ahead.  Third: nothing would even have time to implant before I changed back, much less grow into anything of consequence, because I don’t intend to spend more than a few hours at a time in this form unless and until we have worked out a way to make your utterly insane scheme acceptable to your subjects… which I am not at all confident it is possible to do.”

“All right, then.  I see now that that was a ridiculous question,” Thor admitted amiably.

“Good,” Loki replied, equally amiable.  “Does that change your plans for me?”

“Not really,” said Thor, because what he did now he had been planning to do in any case.  He withdrew his hand from between Loki’s legs and moved down the bed to put his face there instead.  Loki propped himself up on his elbows to look down curiously at what Thor was doing, but after the first stroke of Thor’s tongue to his clit he had difficulty keeping his head up and his eyes open, and soon his arms were too shaky to hold himself up.  He let himself flop back onto the pillows, covering his face with his hands; he was biting his lips to keep from making too much noise—for no reason than his own sense of dignity, Thor supposed, since he could block all sound from traveling through the walls of their room—but he could not stop the whimpers that escaped his throat.  Thor held onto Loki’s thighs not so much to hold his legs still (little good that would have done) as to remind Loki not to try to clamp them shut again, to protect himself from the overwhelming intensity of sensation, and the way the muscles tensed and twitched told Thor that the temptation was strong.

When Loki’s climax overtook him he could no longer hold his lips shut, and he let out a long, low cry. Thor was glad to hear it: he had done his task well if he had broken through the cultivated composure and self-control on which Loki so prided himself.  After several waves of shudders pulsed through his body, Loki started pushing at Thor’s shoulders.  “Too much, get off!” he said urgently.

Obediently, Thor pulled away and climbed back up toward the pillows.  “So, how was that for something new?” he asked slyly.

“Acceptable,” said Loki with a grin, and reached down to take hold of Thor’s cock—achingly hard, after all that—and give it a firm stroke.  Thor groaned with relief, and when Loki had settled into a rhythm, leaned over for a kiss.

When they parted, Loki wrinkled his nose and laughed.  “It’s strange, tasting myself for the first time.  My other self.”

“Your mutable nature gives us opportunities for many more… firsts,” Thor pointed out, his breath starting to come hard and uneven as Loki pulled him toward his release.  When it came he pulled Loki in for another kiss, deep and urgent.

Loki vanished his spend with a practiced, businesslike wave of his hand, then pulled away and stood up from the bed.  Thor sat up with a questioning frown.

“I’d rather do the actual shifting out of your view,” Loki explained.  “It looks… bizarre.  And I’d hate for it to lose that air of mystique.”

“Of course.  The mystique is crucial.”

Thor took his eyepatch off and laid it on the bedside table—an evening ritual he had unexpectedly inherited from his father, still a painful reminder of all he had lost in so short a time.  Thor’s eye was falling shut when Loki returned from the little adjoining bathroom with the body Thor knew better than any save his own.  He looked it over fondly and said, “You’re beautiful this way, too.”

“Yes, good.  Keep practicing.”

Loki climbed into bed and turned to face away from Thor; Thor curled himself around his brother, chest pressed against his back, as Loki expected.  He found himself wishing, as he often did, that they would reverse their roles more often; but perhaps they had had enough novelty for one night.

“I do want to see you in your… other form.  The form of your birth,” he said quietly into Loki’s hair.

Loki’s body tensed.  “To confront the monster you’ve invited into your bed?” he asked, and Thor was unsure whether he meant it as a jest.

“To know all of you,” Thor said.  “Every face and form.”

“You’re sure you want that?” Loki asked dryly.

Thor slipped an arm around Loki’s waist to pull him closer.  “More than sure.”

 


End file.
